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hellais / TAILS-OSX

Contains instructions and scripts to create a TAILS live cd that will boot on OSX without any additional software installed (no REFIT, etc.)
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Revert "Fallback for Current Version Detection" #62

Open rmwb opened 9 years ago

rmwb commented 9 years ago

Reverts hellais/TAILS-OSX#61 It won't work. The URLs will be broken.

rmwb commented 9 years ago

Also, downloading an obsolete version could be bad for opsec... I think it would be better for it to fail...

hellais commented 9 years ago

Then instead of reverting the previous commit, you should just point the URL to /obsolete/$VERSION

rmwb commented 9 years ago

I don't think we should encourage anyone to use the obsolete versions, they could contain exploitable security flaws.

hellais commented 9 years ago

@rmwb I guess that is fair. I don't have a strong opinion for either. @pzp1997 what do you think?

pzp1997 commented 9 years ago

I guess we shouldn't encourage obsolete versions for the reasons @rmwb mentioned. But at the same time, we should not have the script break entirely if the filename is changed; that just seems very flimsy. Why don't we prompt the user asking them if they would like to use the older version (with an explanation of the ramifications of doing such) and use the /obsolete/$TAILS VERSION url?

hellais commented 9 years ago

Yes prompting the user seems like a good middle ground. @rmwb seems reasonable?

rmwb commented 9 years ago

I really baulk at the potential security implications of installing an obsolete version. I can see why you would want to be user friendly and give options, but I think security should trump user satisfaction in the case of this particular application and I would still prefer for it to fail gracefully, perhaps with an explanatory note and a suggestion to log the issue on github.

rmwb commented 9 years ago

Regardless of how you plan to implement a fallback URL or not, this particular commit (#61) is poorly coded, will not work as intended and should really be reverted.

hellais commented 9 years ago

@rmwb I don't see how you can claim that 2 lines of code are poorly coded.

If we need to be honest this whole script is poorly coded and it's mainly my fault :P.

One day it will all be refactored to be as shiny and perfect as diecut diamond, but that day is not today. :gem:

Speaking of the future, this repository will hopefully one day disappear. I have been speaking to Intrigeri (one of the TAILS developers) about merging this effort into something officially supported by TAILS.

From the looks of their latest documentation, they now make images that can just be dd'ied directly onto the drive: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/installation/manual/mac/index.en.html.

I therefore ask myself does this repository still make sense to exist? This is probably a topic best discussed in an ad-hoc ticket.

pzp1997 commented 9 years ago

Fine let's just let it fail gracefully then. At least this way someone will report that the script is broken on GitHub, so that it can be fixed. @rmwb, would you like to write the explanatory error message?